At TEDMED 2015: Using data to maximize human potential

This year’s TEDMED was held Nov. 18-20 in Palm Springs, Calif. Stanford Medicine is a medical research institution partner of TEDMED, and a group of MD and PhD students who represented Stanford at the conference will be sharing their experiences here. A tall, striking woman walked out onto the TEDMED stage. Energetically and confidently, Vivienne Ming, PhD, a theoretical neuroscientist and entrepreneur, went on to tell us about her passion for optimizing human potential utilizing big data. There are many examples where Ming has used data for social good, such as matching refugees to their families with image-recognition software, but here at TEDMED she discussed personalized education. By looking for trends and patterns in classroom data, she has built an educational tool that predicts a child’s grade trajectory in the class and then chooses the highest impact personalized intervention…